This paper builds on work on forced labour and human trafficking to argue for the value of geographical approaches to legal scale, and for more geographical research on the process of jurisdiction. Vulnerability to forced labour and human trafficking is related to processes of social and political categorization and legal characterization. Yet territorial understandings of jurisdiction, and those which conceptualize jurisdiction as a process of sorting, often imply a relatively straightforward correspondence between legal scales and legal subjects. I propose an approach to legal scale that builds on feminist analyses in labour law and human geography.

Progress in Human Geography 2017, Vol. 41(2) 140–158